Keen On

The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic is one of the world’s leading authorities on inequality. In this KEEN ON America conversation, we talked about Milanovic’s interpretation of the history of American economic inequality - from slavery to contemporary capitalism. Why has America become so much unequal over the last fifty years, I asked. And today, in what Milanovic sees as a post neo-liberal age, how does he imagine the future of economic inequality?Branko Milanovic obtained his Ph.D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at

The Brooklyn based Rafil Kroll-Zaidi is a Princeton educated reporter formerly on the editorial staff of Harper's Magazine. And he is another kind of reporter too - a citizen- sleuth who makes six figures annually by reporting polluting trucks in New York City. Writing about this experience for New York magazine, Kroll argues that, in theory, at least, it’s a “win-win” for both himself and the environment. In practice, however, as he confesses, things aren’t quite as black and white when it comes to making a decent living as a reporter of idling trucks on the streets of New York City. Rafil Kroll-Zaidi is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and has been writing the journal’s popular Findings column, among other features, since 2007. Graham Roumieu is the author and illustrator of the celebrated Bigfoot “autobiographies” In Me Own Words, Me Write Book, and I Not Dead. His drawings appear in such publications as the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, and the Walrus.Named as one of the "100

Last Saturday, on our regular That Was The Week tech roundup, Keith Teare and I discussed the French decision to imprison Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Today, we discuss the theoretical imprisonment of Elon Musk, an idea touted yesterday by Robert Reich in The Guardian. Elon Musk, according to Reich, is “out of control” and one way to “rein him in” is to “threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X”. Lock him up, in other words. For Keith Teare, this reflects the increasingly authoritarian nature of American progressives like Reich. Perhaps. But, as we discuss today, the social media mogul Musk is a different kind of beast from 20th century media owners. So reining him in probably requires different strategies from those that tried make moguls like Rupert Murdoch or William Randolph Hearst accountable for the lies and hate spewed by their newspapers and tv stations. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelera

Last month we ran an interview with the Oregon based regenerative wine maker Mimi Casteel about fixing America one sip at a time. In addition, we recorded a KEEN ON America segment with Casteel about her life-long love affair with the American land. Filmed at her family’s beautiful Hope Well Winery, Casteel spoke with an infectious passion about the natural beauty of America. However you think about the current state of the United States, you’ll be inspired by Mimi Casteel’s faith in the regenerative quality of American nature and its land. Strongly recommended. Mimi Casteel is the daughter of Ted Casteel and Pat Dudley, co-founders of Bethel Heights Vineyard. Growing up working in the vineyard and winery, Mimi gained such an appreciation for the industry that she promptly left home after high school. Armed with a BA in History and Classics from Tulane University, Mimi spent the next year working in various National Forests across the west. Her adventures fueled her passion for studying botany, forestry, and

Andrew Leigh is a minister in the Australian parliament with a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Unlike many academic economists, however, Leigh has the gift of simplifying economics for all of us. His new book, How Economics Explains the World, presents economics as the prism to understand the human story. From the dawn of agriculture to AI, Leigh tells the story of how ingenuity, greed, and desire for betterment have, to an astonishing degree, determined humanity’s past, present, and future. Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment, and Federal Member for Fenner in the Australian Parliament. Prior to being elected in 2010, Andrew was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard, having graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in Arts and Law. Andrew is a past recipient of the Economic Society of Australia's Young Economist Award and a Fellow of the Australian Academy o

Formerly Le Monde’s guy in Jerusalem, Piotr Smolar is now the senior correspondent for Le Monde in Washington, DC. He is also the grandson of Hersh Smolar, one of the 20th century’s more remarkable men. As Smolar notes in Bad Jew, the astonishing story of his grandfather’s life from Stalin’s Russia & the Minsk Ghetto to Netanyahu’s Israel, there was, in fact, nothing particularly bad about Hersh Smolar. What was bad was history - the genocidal forces in Nazi Germany & the Soviet Union which Smolar fought against - both as an anti-fascist soldier and as a Polish communist. And then there’s the Jewish Question, also know today as the Israel Question, with which both Smolars are all-too-familiar. Indeed, Smolar’s important new book should probably have been entitled: Bad Jew Grandfathers & Bad Jew Grandsons. Piotr Smolar is a French journalist of Polish origin. He is the senior correspondent for Le Monde in Washington, DC. After working in Moscow from 1997 to 2001, he published a book in French on Ru

Exactly 85 years ago today, on 3 September 1939, the Second World War officially began with Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. Russians might argue, however, the real war began on 22 June 1941 with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. While, for America, of course, the war began on December 7, 1941, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. World War Two was then, in a sense, three wars rolled into one featuring the alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union and America against the Axis. But this alliance, for the historian Giles Milton, was a short-term affair rather than a marriage which would inevitably disintegrate after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Indeed, in his interesting new book, The Stalin Affair, Milton describes it as an “impossible alliance” that might have “won” the war but would lose the peace and trigger the Cold War. GILES MILTON is the internationally best-selling author of twelve works of narrative history, including Nathaniel’s Nutmeg and Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfa

Controversial things are happening on the campus of the University of Austin (UATX), the brand new anti-woke university designed to “dare” its students to “think”. Last week, we interviewed UATX’s founding president, Pano Kanelos, who explained how he was trying to build what he called a 21st century “liberal university”. Today, in this KEEN ON America interview, we talk to Jacob Howland, UATX’s founding Provost, on what should be taught at this university. For some, of course, Howland’s focus on a 21st century anti-woke university education represents a new humanism; for others, it’s the last gasps of a reactionary 20th century intellectual elite. In either case, UATX is a provocative pedagogical experiment which we, at KEEN ON America, will be following as the new university opens its doors to students this month.JACOB HOWLAND is Provost, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin. Previously he was McFarlin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus a

Bryan VanDyke’s new dystopian AI novel, In Our Likeness, only came out today, but it has already over 1,400 reviews on Amazon and is currently their bestselling science fiction book. So what does our seemingly infinite appetite for dystopian AI literature tell us about ourself, I asked VanDyke? Is the popularity of this type of dystopian literature because AI is about to replace humans with smart machines thereby making our species redundant? Or might it be a more persistent feature of modernity : our fear over the last couple of hundred years that any revolutionary new technology - railways, electricity, the computer or the Internet - is sabotaging our most “human” qualities?Bryan VanDyke is a digital strategist and a regular contributor at The Millions. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Northwestern. In addition to his debut novel, IN OUR LIKENESS, he is the author of a book-length essay, ONLY THE TRYING, which is a meditation on the nature of illness and recovery. For the last twenty-

There’s a big fight, perhaps even a war, about to break out between Big Tech and governments around the world. It’s been brewing for several years now, but the news this week from France and Brazil suggests that conventional nation-states are increasingly confident of shutting down popular social networks and jailing their founders. For libertarians like That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, this isn’t good news. In his editorial this week, Keith is particularly troubled by the French government’s decision to indict Telegram founder Pavel Durov.To make Durov liable for Telegram users is an injustice and an abuse of state power by officials who realise it is impossible to prevent privacy, so they resort to bullying and coercion.But I’m not so sure. If Telegram is, indeed, a dark web in your pocket, then the French government might have the right to not only arrest Durov, but even to make its use in France illegal. The legal implications of this case, as well as Brazil’s banning of X, are of course complex.

According to the Californian political sociologist Peter Phillips, American capitalism is facing an existential crisis. In his new book, Titans of Capital, he argues that the concentrated wealth of investment companies like BlackRock and Fidelity not only threatens human rights and democracy, but also the future of planet. Perhaps. But where Phillips really goes out on a limb is to argue that the Chinese state controlled model of capitalism which, he says, has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, is more humane than the free market American model. Seriously?Peter Phillips is a Professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University since 1994, former Director of Project Censored 1996 to 2010 and President of Media Freedom Foundation 2003 to 2017. He has been editor or co-editor of fourteen editions of Censored, co-editor with Dennis Loo of Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney (2006), editor of two editions of Progressive Guide to Alternative Media and Activism (1999 &

The Anglo-Jewish writer Tanya Gold went on holiday to Auschwitz and didn’t much like what she saw. She writes about the experience in “My Auschwitz Vacation: On Holocaust tourism” which ran in this month’s Harper’s. But, as she told me, she would have preferred the piece to have been entitled: “Her Gay Romp Through Jewish Poland” - in honor, of course, of Mel Brooke’s satirical “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” from his 1967 movie The Producers. And there is certainly something Brookean about Gold’s predilection for outrage - a healthy thing, I suspect, especially given the soporific quality of much contemporary Holocaust writing. Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist, who has written for the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, and the Sunday Times (London), amongst other publications. She was awarded Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2010, also being nominated for Columnist of the Year, and was commended in the Feature W

Last year, we had a great conversation with Branko Milanovic, author of Visions of Inequality, about how classical economists like Smith, Riccardo, Marx and Pareto analyze inequality. Our guest today, David Lay Williams, asks the same question - but from the perspective of political philosophers like Rousseau, JS Rousseau and Hobbes. In his new book, The Greatest of All Plagues, Williams traces how economic inequality has shaped political theory over the last two thousand years. And in our age of increasingly sharp economic inequalities, Williams reminds us, what Plato called “the greatest of all plagues” is anything but an academic problem. David Lay Williams is Professor of Political Science at DePaul University. He earned his PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment (2007), Rousseau's 'Social Contract': An Introduction (2014), and The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (2024). He h

Something interesting is happening in downtown Austin. Next month, The University of Austin (UATX), a new undergraduate college claiming to “be dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”, opens its well financed doors. Launched as a supposedly “anti-woke” university, UATX has some heavy hitting advisors including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Larry Summers, Andrew Young, Jonathan Haidt and Bari Weiss. It’s founding president is the Shakespeare scholar, Pano Kanelos, who is described as “an outspoken advocate for liberal education”. And so, when I sat down with Kanelos on the UATX campus, we talked about the idea of a “liberal education” and why there’s a need in contemporary America for one more liberal arts college. Pano Kanelos is the founding president of the University of Austin. From 2017 to 2021, Dr. Kanelos served as the 24th President of St. John’s College, Annapolis. After earning degrees from Northwestern University (B.A.), Boston University (M.A.), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), he taug

As the author of the bestselling Master Algorithm, University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos is one of the world’s most respected AI experts. So I was a little surprised that his new book, 2040, is a science-fictional satire of American politics & Silicon Valley. In 2040, Domingos is, however, also using fiction to write a critique of the current Silicon Valley mania for AI. The book is both a warning about the technological limits of AI as well as an investigation of the way that it could truly democratize American politics. And so, by 2040, Domingos promised me, we really might be close to the reality of what he calls “an agora in a Presibot”. Pedro Domingos is a leading AI researcher and the author of the worldwide bestseller "The Master Algorithm", an introduction to machine learning for a general audience. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle. He won the SIGKDD Innovation Award and the IJCAI John McCarthy Award, two of the highest honors in data sci

At the DNC last week, the Warriors coach and former Bulls star Steve Kerr spoke of his excitement at his return to Chicago’s United Center, the home of some his greatest basketball triumphs. According to the Columbia University historian Frank Andre Guridy, there’s nothing coincidental about this convergence of American politics and sports. In his intriguing new book, THE STADIUM, Guridy reimagines America through the history of sports stadiums like Candlestick Park & Madison Square Gardens. It’s a story of politics, protest and play in which these sports stadiums act as mirrors and prisms to all the most troubling and hopeful aspects of American history.Frank A. Guridy is Professor of History and African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. His la

As one of the victims of Donald Trump’s notorious 2020 dismissal of Inspector Generals, Glenn A. Fine — a longtime Inspector General of both the departments of Justice & Defense - knows a thing or two about both honest government. In his new book, Watchdogs, Fine presents the Inspectors General as the last line of defense for uncorrupt American institutions. In his words, they are “pillars of democracy” and, as such, we should think of these government officials as “broad shouldered" public servants” rather than “pointy headed bureaucrats”.Glenn A. Fine formerly served as the acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense and as the Inspector General of the Department of Justice. He is a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School, and has taught at Stanford Law School.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the

“We don’t need no education”, Pink Floyd announced in 1979. “Teachers leave those kids alone”:We don't need no educationWe don’t need no thought controlNo dark sarcasm in the classroomTeachers leave them kids aloneHey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!But today, almost half a century later, That Was The Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare believes that technology might be radically reinventing education and healing the historically fraught relationship between teachers and kids. Today, Keith argues in this week’s newsletter, kids like his 17-year old son are discovering that they love AI as a co-creative tool for educating themselves. And 21st century teachers too, he suggests, can reinvent themselves from annoying pedagogues into helpful guides to new AI technology. In other words:You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the AI wind is blowingAll You Need is OpenAI and Anthropic. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital

William Deresiewicz is a leading American writer best known as the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. And so, when Bill and I sat down in Portland for a KEEN ON America conversation, we discussed the crisis of a high-end university system that he, as a former professor at Yale, knows all too well. But Bill, a keen conversationalist, also talked about what it means to be both a Jew and an American in a country which simultaneously values personal reinvention and cultural identity. William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist and critic, a frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and other venues, and the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, which was published in a 10th-anniversary edition in May 2024. His most recent book is The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society. His current project is a historically info

I have to admit that I’m always a little uncomfortable with non-Jews fetishizing the supposedly unique gifts & accomplishments of the Jewish people. A century ago, Winston Churchill did it. And now George Gilder, the influential tech futurist, picks up that Churchillian mantle in a new edition of his 2012 book The Israel Test. Israel’s “genius”, Gilder argues, “enriches” the world to such an extent that anyone who questions it is, by definition, a critic of innovation, freedom and progress - not to mention, of course, a rabid anti-semite. I’m not convinced. But then, as a secular Jew who would fail Gilder’s Israel Test, what do I know?GEORGE GILDER‘s books have sold more than two million copies worldwide. In Wealth and Poverty, one of the most influential works of our time, Gilder made the moral case for capitalist creativity. In Spirit of Enterprise, Microcosm, Telecosm, Life After Television, Life After Google, a bestseller in both the US and China, and Life After Capitalism, Gilder achieved renown as a